Highland Student Helps After Harvey

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Most Highland students spent the afternoon of Aug 30th doing homework or hanging out with friends. However, 9th-grader Samuel Munns spent the 30th in a military truck driving through foot-high rainwater.

Hurricane Harvey hit Houston on August 19th and did more than $100 billion worth of damage. After hearing about this, Munns and his father flew to Houston to help the civilians.

Munns and his father got on a plane to Dallas and rented a car in order to drive to Houston. After being turned around by police because of high waters, the two stopped in a gas station parking lot which just so happened to also be occupied by a government military truck that had been designated to help clean up after the storm. At the sight of this, Munns’s father casually walked up to the vehicle and asked if they wouldn’t mind having two people join them in their efforts. What followed the next day was 16 hours of damage control and rescuing.

Much of Munns’s well received help was in smaller towns outside Houston where there was far worse drainage and water had built up. Here, Munns, his father and the crew in the military truck aided more than 20 people out of their flooded homes and stemmed the bleeding from the destructive flooding.

“There were a lot of people who lived on hills or whose houses were above the water line but were trapped and just needed supplies,” Munns said.

In Houston, Munns and his father helped tear down wet drywall from severely damaged houses. Almost all of the damage came from the uncontrollable flooding that the towns had gotten.

“there was a lot of damage” Munns said. “There were sandbags but they had gotten like fifty inches of rain.”

At this point, many of the government aid agencies hadn’t had gotten fully into motion yet and help from people like Munns and his dad was hard to come by and extremely well received.